Synopsis

Komi-san is the beautiful and admirable girl that no-one can take their eyes off her. Almost the whole school sees her as the cold beauty out of their league, but Tadano Shigeo knows the truth: she's just really bad at communicating with others.

Komi-san, who wishes to fix this bad habit of hers, tries to improve it with the help of Tadano-kun.

Characters

This is the one-shot that eventually spawned the longer series of the same name. As far as I'm aware, the one-shot is identical to the first chapter of the official manga, but I may be mistaken; this review treats it as such, so I apologize for any confusion and will gladly revise this if anyone knows of a different chapter for this title.

Story, 7: This is reminiscent of Watamote, with a socially awkward girl as our secondary protagonist. The main protagonist tries to help her get over her fear of social interactions, which leads to several comedic moments.

Characters, 7: We don't really get to know much about any other characters aside from the two leads, but both themselves and their relationship gets marginal development throughout the relatively short read, which I appreciated.

Enjoyment, 7: It definitely sparked my interest in the main series, but I plan on reading that upon its completion. It had some decent humor, and I liked the premise of the plot.

Overall, 7: For anyone unsure about leaping into the main series, this would be a suitable place to start and gauge your interest/enjoyment of the basic plot. Comedy fans looking for a quick read would also probably like this title.

Talking to new people and making friends when one feels unsure of themselves often feels awkward and difficult, and most people have at least one experience where they have felt out of their depth socially. Komi-san wa Comyushou desu takes a look at a girl learning to interact with others despite her initially cold and intimidating appearance.

Often this sort of interaction is made into a comedy through cringe humor, something like Watamote for instance. Komi-san takes a different path by making the humor based around the main character, Komi, clearly work to fix her problems when dealing with people rather than remaining stony and stand-offish.
Even in this short one-shot, the audience watchers as the other character, Tadano, comes to understand and communicate better with Komi. The humor value is more looking at how far Komi still has to interact with others well, even if she does incrementally better with each encounter

Due to being a one shot the story can’t do much more than showcase the potential of the story, but does manage to show progress and change, which I counted as a plus and definitely made me more interested in the longer story. The art is fairly average, save for the occasionally chibified or other stylization used to show how characters feel or the aura they’re meant to give off during the story.

Overall, this one shot does it’s job of creating interest for the main story, and provides a reasonable way for the reader to decide if they are interested enough to commit to a longer story.